Black and white flash design of a skull in a sombrero, flanked by roses and crossed daggers beneath a diamond, with blackletter text reading Pierce the Veil.

Skull in sombrero with roses and daggers

Black and grey · Flash

A skull wearing a sombrero with a patterned band sits at the centre, with roses at each eye socket and beside it, a diamond above two crossed daggers. Blackletter lettering reading Pierce the Veil arches across the top. The design uses fine white linework and stippled shading on a solid black background, with symmetrical composition.

Skull Rose Dagger Diamond Blackletter Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They still talk about the night the skeleton came to the fiesta at San Lázaro, wearing a sombrero so broad it shaded the whole plaza. The mayor's wife noticed the roses first, red ones blooming in his eye sockets as if someone had tended them, and she was the one who stepped forward to ask what he wanted.

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He wanted only a song, he said, and a seat at the long table. The guests gave him both out of politeness, though nobody sang, because the guitarist had forgotten every tune he knew. Old Ignacio the cobbler, who had buried three wives and talked to all of them afterwards, pulled his chair closer and said he would sing if the skeleton first answered one question honestly. The skeleton laid two daggers crossed on the cloth, and a diamond above them caught the lamplight like a cold star.

Ignacio asked whether it was true that the dead could not lie. The skeleton said it was not the dead who lied but the living, and that the daggers were for cutting the lies out of a man before he carried them down to the grave. Then he asked Ignacio to name the first wife he had loved. Ignacio named her, then the second, and then he stopped, because the third had been a woman he married for her dowry and never once looked at properly. The skeleton tipped his hat, set the diamond on the cloth, and waited.

Ignacio sang that night until the candles guttered. In the morning the roses had gone from the skeleton's sockets and grown instead across the cobbler's grave, one for every word he had finally said aloud.